XP Home Problem: Start > All Programs Menu is Frozen

Hello!

I'm having a very odd problem with Windows XP that started this afternoon. I did not install or do anything to my system, it just happened out of the blue.

The issue is when I go to START > All Programs, I am not able to click on any of the program folders to launch any programs. They are totally frozen and not accessible with my mouse.

The START menu programs are accessible, just the "All Programs" selections are not.

TROUBLESHOOTING DONE:
I admit to having a lot of programs, I thought maybe it was overload. So I went in to Documents and Settings > All Users > Start Menu and I re-grouped the programs into other folders to cut down on the space it took up. This did not help.

I had a lot of things on my desktop and I cleared all those to another drive. Did not help.

Started in Safe Mode, and had no problem at all accessing the START > All Programs area. They worked just fine in Safe Mode. Not sure what this says, but I'm sure it might give someone with more expertise a hint? (I hope so anyway!)

I should also mention that yesterday I did a deep full scan with AVG Anti Virus of both of my drives and it's clean. I also ran an a-Squared anti Malware scan and it was also clean. So i don't think this is a virus, unless it's a new and really sneaky one!

System Specs:
Microsoft Windows XP - SP2 (up to date)
AMD Athlon 64 X2
Dual Core Processor 4200+
2.20GHz
2GB RAM

If anyone could shed some light on this for me and help me get back the ability to access my programs from the START menu, that would be wonderful!

Thanks

 

Hmmm... very strange. Try Dial-A-Fix. All it really does is unregister and re-register all your system .dll files, (and some other things) but this may help. It's free from MajorGeeks: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4899.html Or maybe try running a system restore to a day or two before the weirdness began...
Good luck!

 

Oh yeah... in Dial-A-Fix, check all the boxes in the Registration Center....

 

dlb! Thanks for that, actually I found a fix for it by doing this:
Go to Start/Run and type or copy and paste:

regsvr32 /i shell32

Click OK

Restart your computer

This worked like a charm. But it is still related to what you said about the dlls. Somehow they got screwey... not sure how tho!

 

Hmmm, this is so weird.

Strangely, this problem is happening a lot today. The fix I used is also only working intermittently.

I'll run it, shut down and come back up and the problem is still there. Or I'll run it, shut down and it will only work for a few minutes and the start menu freezes again.

What could be causing this problem?

Thanks!